BEFORE: We accomplished two things today, my wife and I took a bunch of old electronics (one computer, several keyboards, 4 or 5 old cell phones and three broken DVD/VCR combo recorders) to an e-cycling event. There haven't been many of those in NYC since the pandemic hit, but we found one not too far away in Queens, and they were happy to unload our car for us while we stayed inside, in masks. We figured our good deed earned us breakfast at a nearby diner, and then we set our sights on voting. It was the first day of early voting in New York - and I forgot to mention this yesterday, as a tie-in with the election of the leader of the Markos Dance Academy in "Suspiria". I know, that was set in Germany, not America so there's only a loose connection. We spent maybe 90 minutes in line at the polling center, there were so many people eager to vote, I wonder why. In previous elections there's been so much effort trying to get people to vote, and still the largest voting block of all was the people who stayed home. It turns out all you have to do to increase voter turnout is elect the worst President in history, allow him to ignore science to create a raging pandemic, and also allow him (and other politicians) to polarize every single issue. Now everyone on BOTH sides is in a desperate rush to cast their vote, and even though I know the polling numbers are on the side of truth and justice (and not lies and corruption) right now, the fact that both sides are incredibly fanatical means I won't relax until all the results are in. Just because I agree with one side, I shouldn't get comfortable and think that means that side will win, because there are more than enough simpletons in this country who elected him in the first place, and right now they're just as charged up and desperate and one-sided in their thinking as the smarter people are.
It's going to be a long ten days - but I'm starting the final week of my horror chain, and thankfully I'm back to films that don't seem to be taking themselves too seriously. An animated film for kids just can't be straight horror, so I'm expecting pure silliness and nonsense today - which may only seem weird because I've programmed this between (probably) the two scariest films in my line-up. So I'm just going to bounce back and forth between extremes, it seems. Stylistic whiplash is often a concern here at the Movie Year.
Chloe Grace Moretz carries over from "Suspiria", and I'm realizing a bit too late that she's also been in a number of other horror movies, most notably the 2005 remake of "The Amityville Horror" and the 2013 remake of "Carrie". OK, my bad, because I don't have room for either of those this year, my October dance card is full, and I don't have access to those films at the moment (though "Carrie" is available on demand right now for just 99 cents, but I've got nothing to pair it with...). Oh, well, there's always next October, right? I'll add these films to the list as "maybes" and sometime next year I'll try to determine if these films will help complete a chain or something.
THE PLOT: The eccentrically macabre family moves to a bland suburb where Wednesday Addams' friendship with the daughter of a hostile and conformist reality design show host exacerbates conflict with the local population.
AFTER: Perhaps things were always very polarized in our nation, but I was too young to fully understand this back in the 1970's. Back then there were still liberals and conservatives, the hippies and the establishment, rock fans and jazz fans, so there were areas where people just didn't see eye to eye. I didn't watch "The Addams Family" when it first aired in 1964, because I was busy not being born yet. Anyway, I was a "Munsters" kid, because that show was syndicated in reruns in the Boston area, and I had no idea how to watch "The Addams Family". This was back before streaming, before cable, before there was a channel that told you what was on all the other channels. Primitive times, right? You couldn't buy a whole season of a classic TV show on DVD, and you couldn't binge anything, you had to wait a whole week for the next installment of something, we only had three network channels and maybe two or three local ones, so our whole entertainment supply came in limited quantities, and we had no control over the WHEN of it all.
So, invariably, when I think about "The Addams Family", I also think about "The Munsters", a similar franchise that has thankfully not been re-booted in decades, though some poor sap is probably being forced to work on that right now, after the success of the "Hotel Transylvania" movies. "The Munsters" was at least a one-for-one analog of classic monster movie characters, father Herman was a Frankenstein monster, his wife and father-in-law were vampires, and then somehow his son was a werewolf and his daughter was a normal human, so clearly TV writers back then had no idea how either monsters or genetics work. They had a dragon that lived under the stairs and drove a weird coffin-car hot-rod hearse, and then I think most of the comedy came from the townspeople around them dealing with the fact that their neighbors were monsters who considered themselves a normal family. Goofy monsters, but still monsters. If there was anything resembling plotlines, I sure don't remember it - each episode had close to zero nutritional value, in other words.
"The Addams Family" series ran on TV during the same era (both beginning in 1964), but was different, in that "The Munsters" aired on CBS and "The Addams Family" was on ABC. And in "The Addams Family", it wasn't so clear which classic movie monster each character was based on, because "The Munsters" had the rights to adapt the classic Universal characters, and the other show didn't. Ah, so that's why we don't really know WHAT Gomez is, he's just a guy, a very weird creepy guy. Grandmama is a witch (right?) and Morticia is some kind of vampiress, only not really? Of course they all go back to the designs from cartoons drawn by Charles Addams for The New Yorker (starting in 1937), and many people pointed out a similarity between Morticia and Addams' first and second wives (Barbara Jean Day and Estelle Barb). He felt no need at the time to say, "This character's a vampire, and this one's a werewolf" because he was more focused on their creepy macabre actions, like trying to kill each other, or Wednesday chopping the heads off of her dolls. The characters developed from their actions in the story - but with "The Munsters", it was the other way around, the story developed from the characters placed in a fish-out-of-water situation.
Despite the live-action TV show, and a couple of live-action movies in the early 1990's (more on those in a bit), one could say that animation is the most appropriate medium for these characters - after all, anything can happen in animation, if you can think of it, you can draw it. And the Addams Family started out in illustrated print cartoons, where again, anything can happen - plus there WAS an animated version of them on TV, which came a few years after the live-action show. Then when you juxtapose the macabre aspect of something gruesome or horrible with the innocence and nonsense of a cartoon, somehow that balances out. A drawing of somebody with their head in a guillotine is very different from a photograph of the same subject - the latter's just a little bit too real, and is scary, but the other one's a cartoon, possibly a joke in progress. This is what led us to "Scooby-Doo" cartoons, which started airing in 1969, and that just never would have worked in a live-action show, a couple of squares and a stoner with a talking dog, driving around the country de-bunking ghosts and zombies as (typically) just handymen in masks trying to get people to stay off the property they were trying to steal.
(But eventually after several years, the "Scooby-Doo" franchise devolved into even further nonsense - the addition of guest stars like Don Knotts, Phyllis Diller, Batman and Robin, The Harlem Globetrotters and the Three Stooges just led to a lot of questions. I can understand Hanna-Barbera practicing corporate synergy by doing a crossover with Josie and the Pussycats or even Speed Buggy, but a young kid shouldn't be made to stay up nights, wondering how Batman, Yogi Bear and Don Knotts can all be part of the same fictional universe.)
Thankfully, The Addams Family and The Munsters could never, ever meet - it would be too much like what we saw in "Zombieland: Double Tap" when the heroes met another zombie-fighting team, and the two teams were so alike that they could never see eye to eye. They'd cancel each other out, always be trying to one-up each other, and focus on those minuscule differences in their dogma that would become sticking points, then argue and never speak again. But while "The Munsters" tried very hard to be normal and fit in, the Addams Family was akin to Bizarro, Superman's foe who would just do everything in an opposite fashion. If Bizarro says, "Goodbye, Superman, I'm there to help you!" we all have to pause a second and realize he means, "Hello, Superman, I'm here to kill you!" Everything the Addamses do, it's based on something normal, only they do it in a twisted way, and that just becomes tiresome after a while. We have to be reminded of this at every turn, it seems.
Now, a word or two about the 1991 live-action movie, famous for the appearances of Anjelica Huston as Morticia, Raul Julia as Gomez, Christopher Lloyd as Fester and Christina Ricci as Wednesday. Spot-on casting, to be sure. And I suppose every reboot reflects the time during which it was made, but the plot was really threadbare, with someone impersonating the long-lost Uncle Fester in order to get at the money stored in the family's safe. Everything got bogged down in con games, legal battles and a school play, and it went around in circles only to end up back where it (should have) started. The sequel film, "Addams Family Values", was a little better, with a serial-killer nanny hired to watch the family's new baby, and Wednesday and Pugsley disrupting the status quo at a summer camp. The title was a poke at the Republican "family values" of the Reagan years. Oh, I forgot to mention the unfortunate involvement of MC Hammer in the soundtrack for the first film. Again, those were different times.
The best thing I can say about the 2019 reboot movie is that it starts with something akin to an origin story, as Gomez and Morticia's wedding is seen for the first time (I think), complete with angry villagers who disrupt the ceremony, even though at this point the characters have not been portrayed as doing anything close to evil, or even all that weird. The downside here is that the franchise is coasting on its history, relying on the fact that we've seen these characters before and we know what they're capable of. Or else someone's hoping that the story will define the characters, which is the same problem that occurred in their TV show. Within five minutes, the couple is married, settling down in New Jersey (because it's the most horrible place they can imagine) and they've taken over an abandoned haunted asylum as their home and taken in Lurch, a former mental patient, as their butler. (Again, character inconsistency, I always assumed Lurch was another Frankenstein monster, but I guess that's a copyrighted Universal character, so they had to come up with a new backstory.). It all feels very rushed, before the story fast-forwards to when they have two pre-teen kids.)
NITPICK POINT: It's fine to want to make the house something akin to a character, and give it a back-story, but most lunatic asylums don't resemble Gothic mansions, they wouldn't have a ballroom or a drawing room, they'd have cells and such. We see ONE padded cell, which is where Lurch resides, but in a true asylum, nearly EVERY room would look like that. What's wrong with a good, old-fashioned haunted house? This asylum thing feels very shoehorned-in.
The characters here suffer from very strange design choices - everyone's either roly-poly like Gomez, Fester or Pugsley, or impossibly thin like Morticia, Wednesday and the new friend character, Parker. But they all have giant heads - simply, every character's head is much too big, and most of the eyes are too round. I get that the characters need to all look odd, and be distinguishable from the normal townspeople, but I'd venture this process just was consistently taken too far. With Parker I couldn't even tell if the character was male or female, or designed to be non-binary perhaps, I had to look up who did the voice to finally land on "female", but were they trying to make a point about gender, or did they just forget to add a story detail? I know, I should get past this because of the current zeitgeist, but I think in the end it is important to the story - if Wednesday makes a female friend, that has different implications than if she has a male friend. Or not, whatever, but I'm still old school on this. Just draw the character better.
Parker's mother is the host of a design/renovation show who's also the villain of the piece, she's remodeled an entire town called Assimilation which is right below the mountain that the Addams home is on, and apparently they didn't hear ANY of the construction work going on (NITPICK POINT: This would have taken MONTHS to build an entire town...) or seen it being built, because the fog from the marsh has been clouded over the Addams' mansion for years, which was the way they liked it. But they can't live in a bubble forever, at some point they need to interact with normal humans to get that whole "fish out of water" story rolling. They could have done this story any of a hundred ways, however, and I'm wondering how and why they landed on "evil design show reality TV host builds a town". Somehow it's both by-the-numbers and completely unbelievable at the same time - but again, it seems that the story was meant to reflect the times we live in. The worst thing we can imagine is to be assimilated, and live in a town where everyone is expected to act all "normal" and "perfect" and not be different or freakish in any way?
So I'll allow that there's SORT OF a good message here, we have to stand up to Margaux and her army of Karens who want to use social media to make the world the way they want it to be, where everybody is cookie-cutter and mows their lawn to the right length and has the right skin tone that doesn't scare her in any way, and certainly there are no weird monster-like people living next door who are up to who-knows-what at night. It's better (?) to allow that we're all slightly freakish in our own way even if that means we put our underwear in the freezer before a hot summer day or sit backwards on the toilet just so we have a place to put the book we're reading. (These were actual examples mentioned in the film, just think about the ones they DIDN'T use...)
But then it sends the WRONG message (beyond the suggestion that pre-teen girls should be so thin that they're anorexic and their necks aren't strong enough to hold up their heads) in that when your family home is threatened by angry neighbors, the appropriate response is to allow your kids access to explosives so they can save the house (which gets destroyed anyway) and the side with the bigger, badder weapons always wins.
The rest of the storyline doesn't amount to anything - Pugsley has problems learning a sabre mazurka, a rite of passage that consists of a complex ceremony when he turns 13, and which feels like a very contrived take on a Bar Mitzvah, he has to read screams from a "Terror" (not a Torah) and then he bungles the sword dance - who even cares? It was all just an excuse to get the extended family back together and introduce even weirder relatives.
A few more NITPICK POINTS: the character's name is Cousin ITT. With TWO "T's", not one. If you just call him "It" then there's confusion with the Stephen King story of the same name, which also got referenced here in a gag. You also shouldn't change a character's name, just for a reboot. Plus, we've seen the "Wednesday goes to public school" storyline done before, although I will allow that having her go above and beyond in the dissecting frogs lesson in biology class was a nice touch. Other references to "Titanic", "Watchmen" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" are hit-or-miss at best.
In-jokes are fine, too, but most of the ones here are either aimed at either the young kids or the old senior fans, very rarely both. As a result, depending on who you are, half of the gags probably won't even land. Thing teaching Lurch to play the classic TV theme on the pipe organ serves no real purpose UNLESS you were a fan of the old 1960's show. And even then, I've got issues with the lyrics, which were horrible then and are still horrible. "Ooky" is not a legit word, just some lyricist's creation to have a third rhyme to go with "kooky" and "spooky". Similarly, the word is "scream", not "screa-um", just admit you couldn't think of a third rhyme for "museum" and "see 'em". (The word you couldn't find was "mausoleum", by the way.).
Oh, well, at least they finally established whose mother Grandma is - she's the mother of both Gomez and Fester, by default as Morticia is seen here speaking to her dead parents via a seance. (It's the equivalent of a phone call in the Addams Family world). And this film did really well at the box office, so there's a sequel planned for 2021, or at least it was planned for that date before the whole pandemic shut-down - now, who knows? Just pray that the "Munsters" animated reboot gets postponed indefinitely.
Also starring the voices of Oscar Isaac (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Charlize Theron (last seen in "Bombshell"), Finn Wolfhard (last seen in "It"), Nick Kroll (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets 2"), Bette Midler (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story), Snoop Dogg (last seen in "The Beach Bum"), Allison Janney (last seen in "Tallulah"), Conrad Vernon (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Martin Short (last heard in "The Willoughbys"), Catherine O'Hara (last seen in "Killers"), Tituss Burgess (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Jenifer Lewis (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Elsie Fisher (last heard in "Despicable Me 2"), Aimee Garcia (last heard in "Spanglish"), Scott Underwood (last heard in "Sausage Party"), Mikey Madison (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Pom Klementieff (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Chelsea Frei, Deven Green, Maggie Wheeler, Harland Williams (last seen in "Superstar").
RATING: 3 out of 10 hidden cameras
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